Lovely Package

Curating the very best packaging design

“Eno Wines is a Berkeley-based, boutique winery producing small batches of Pinot Noir, Old Vine Zinfandel, Grenache, and Syrah from world class and undiscovered vineyards.

From the beginning, Eno Wines has been a labor of love for all involved.

The labels for the bottles hold equal importance to the wine inside – a new idea back then has become an industry standard. For the past ten years, the challenge remains the same: find the story and tell it better. The 2008 wines held special importance as it was the year Sasha, the winemaker, became a father. The labels always obliquely reflected events in his life and the theme for that year could only be family.”

Comments

Just out of interest Jin, why don’t you think they work on a wine bottle? I’m not sure I get the story, but they look engaging and I love the idea that the wines depict a major event from that year in his life, I’m just not sure I get that from looking at the visuals above. But despite that, I just like them. Sometimes you just have to be different and have personality.

marcello February 17th, 2011 @ 12:43 am

kids on the label of wine bottles.
wow! now THAT’s a great message to send…

Some context- each year we change the label design (but keep the same typographic treatment of the logo, wine detail, etc). This particular year, 2004, was “a family archetypes”. Hence the names and the pictures of family members.

We feel like people connect w/ stories behind the wines more than some scripty text w/ a photo of chateau and some generic descriptions about the wines. It seems to resonate with people- I get calls all the time saying, “My fiancee is the Wild One and I’m more or less the Gifted One”..

To be honest we struggled whether to put on children on the labels. Our very first commercial release had illustrations of children on them. They were called, “Little Miss Dangerous” and “Small Town Hero” We were concerned that the government agency that approves labels would feel that is was “targeting children” (e.g. Joe Camel lawsuit from years ago). With all labels with the “cuddly animals” (koala bears, kangaroos,fish, etc), seems like they are open to artistic expression.

If you have any questions or comments, feel free to reply or email me directly.

Both Sasha and I were huge 4AD fans when we first started working together. And we respected their decisions to be intentionally elusive with visual meaning.

One aspect in our wine label collaboration we embraced is the idea of the “delayed ah-ha” as opposed to literal visual interpretation. Why not put a little spit on the ball rather than the ol’ underhanded throw? The labels are designed to have an immediate visual impact. But as far as meaning or concept we like something that requires time for discovery.

For these labels, the reference to atomic energy reference is not overt. The low hanging fruit as far as meaning could be references to the nuclear family. Sure. But upon further reflection we find the mother/daughter and nucleus/electron connection. We also find the father/son and reactor/light bulb connection. These ideas are, intentionally, not obvious as individual bottles but designed to be more understandable when together…as a family.

We don’t expect everyone to sit around and think about the meaning of a wine label illustration. The same way we don’t expect every person who drinks the wine to sit around and think about every little aspect of the taste. But in both situations, if they chose to think about the meaning or think about the taste, we hope they find a certain amount of satisfaction.

These are great design issues to discuss and welcome further opinions.

Cheers.

Molly November 11th, 2012 @ 8:53 am

Marcello, I think you missed the chimerical message entirely. Pity, as I find the quixotic whimsy of the labels refreshing, therefore incredibly desirable.